Chapter 7: What Pete Said
Ryan rang Pete that afternoon while the kids were watching something loud in the living room.
I was folding laundry on the bed and I could hear Ryan's side of it through the wall — short answers, a few laughs, one long pause.
When he came in he sat on the edge of the bed and watched me fold a small sock.
"Pete said he seemed different today," Ryan said.
"Quieter than usual but not in a bad way.
More settled."
"Did he say anything about the cake?"
"He brought it in.
Shared it round the break room." Ryan picked up the other sock.
"Pete said he put it on the table and just said, 'Help yourselves.' Didn't make a speech.
Didn't explain where it came from."
I thought about that.
A twenty-year-old boy putting a Victoria sponge on a table in a break room and saying nothing.
Letting people eat it.
Letting it just be a birthday cake.
"Good," I said.
"Pete said one of the older lads asked where he got it and Danny said, 'Someone made it for me.'" Ryan set the folded sock down.
"That was all he said."
I stopped folding.
Someone made it for me.
Not Ryan's mum.
Not a woman he'd never met who'd heard his story through three people and spent a Friday afternoon in her kitchen thinking about a woman called Carol.
Just: someone made it for me.
"He knew what it meant," I said.
"Yeah.
I think he did."
I sat down on the bed next to Ryan.
The laundry could wait.
"Pete also said something else," Ryan said.
"What?"
"He said the lads have started making sure Danny's on the same lunch break as at least one of them.
Not every day.
Just most days.
Nobody organised it.
It just sort of happened."
I looked at him.
"When did that start?"
"Apparently the week after his mum passed.
Pete said nobody talked about it.
Someone just started doing it and the others followed."
I thought about a group of working men quietly rearranging their breaks so a nineteen-year-old wouldn't eat alone, and nobody mentioning it, and nobody needing to.
"You work with good people," I said.
"I know." He was quiet for a moment.
"I don't think I've ever said that out loud before."
"You should."
"Yeah."
The kids erupted in the living room over something — a disagreement about the remote, from the sound of it.
Ryan stood up.
"I'll go," he said.
I watched him go.
Then I picked up the laundry and kept folding, and I thought about the dish on the middle shelf, and the writing on the lid, and the whole long week that had come out of one moment of not knowing what I was looking at.
The week had been worth it.
That was the thing.
Not the worry — the worry I could have done without.
But everything that came after.
The lasagna.
The cake.
Ryan on the phone to Callum for an hour.
Brenda sitting still so the baby wouldn't wake.
Pete rearranging a lunch break without making it a thing.
May you like
All of it started with a glass dish and a blue lid and two words in someone else's handwriting.
I put the last of the laundry away and went downstairs.
